Shawn Reynaldo is a Barcelona-based writer and editor who specializes in electronic music. His First Floor newsletter often zeroes in on developments in the genre’s corresponding industry and culture, but the Second Floor column is designed to spotlight the music itself, examining trends, recommending releases, and keeping tabs on what’s happening both on and off the dancefloor.

Latin club sounds are all over dance music right now. They’re coming out of Miami, Colombia, Brazil, and a litany of other places around the globe, and while that’s generally been a cause for celebration, there are some drawbacks, beginning with the term “Latin club.” Considering that Latin America spans two continents and is home to more than 600 million people, boiling all of its music down into a single descriptor can feel gallingly reductive. Even so, in a scene that’s often laser-focused on sounds from Europe and North America, the attention currently being given to Latin club does at least reflect an openness to voices and rhythms from other parts of the planet.

Genres like reggaeton, guaracha, cumbia, raptor house and Brazilian funk (a.k.a baile funk), can now routinely be heard on fashionable and forward-thinking European and North American dancefloors. The “deep reggaeton” stylings of DJ Python—who cooked up the tongue-in-cheek term to describe his meditative rhythms—have been showered with acclaim, and Sangre Nueva, his collaborative project with fellow Latin producers Florentino and Kelman Duran, has been booked at clubs and festivals around the globe. Rio de Janeiro funk upstart Ramon Sucesso is arguably redefining the craft of DJing, while Colombian artist co-founder Verraco has become a legitimate critical darling—it’s not often a club-focused record is named Best New Music. Meanwhile, the TraTraTrax label he co-founded has continually pushed the envelope with releases from producers like BADSISTA, Doctor Jeep, Tomás Urquieta, and Luca Durán. It may have been hyperbolic (not to mention ethnocentric) when Resident Advisor described the label as the 2020s equivalent of the influential British imprint Hessle Audio, but there’s no question that TraTraTrax is currently one of the most influential outposts in all of electronic music.

It was “Xtasis,” a 2022 track by South Florida native Nick Léon and raptor house innovator DJ Babatr, that put TraTraTrax on the map, but the song’s success has ultimately proved life-changing for everyone involved. After decades of being largely unknown outside of his native Venezuela, where he pioneered the rough-and-ready raptor house sound during his time in Caracas’ minitecas (mobile soundsyetm) scene, DJ Babatr has now been catapulted onto the international touring circuit. Last year, he even cut a collab track, “MK3TReF,” with avant-pop queen Arca. As for León, he’s also become a globe-trotting DJ, but in between gigs, he’s being courted by the pop set, and has already landed production work with artists like Rosalía and Erika de Casier. Moreover, his dizzying ascent has prompted a reevaluation of the entire Miami scene. Once derided by some in dance music circles as a tacky cultural backwater that offered little more than EDM, tech house, and bottle service, the city has now been recast as a hub of musical innovation, with a new generation of Latin artists like Jonny from Space, Sister System, Coffintexts and former Miami residents Bitter Babe and INVT leading the way. 

Will Europe and North America’s openness to these sounds last? That’s a tougher question. Western audiences have a disturbing tendency to treat Latin sounds—and, honestly, sounds from pretty much any region of the developing world—as temporary trends, happily gorging on the initial hype before quickly losing interest and moving on. Given the consistently high level of turnover in club culture, there tends to be a kind of institutional amnesia about this behavior, and what results is a weird sort of pendulum, one in which dance music’s most influential power centers only perceive Latin sounds to be important every decade or so.

This Has Happened Before … And It Involved Diplo

As hot as Latin club is right now, a similar hype cycle got underway approximately 20 years ago, and eventually coalesced around the terms “tropical bass” and “global bass.” The history of that trend wasn’t particularly well documented, and thanks to what we now realize to be the extremely fragile nature of online archives, much of what was published by blogs and other fly-by-night outposts has disappeared. It just so happens that I was deeply involved in this particular circuit during the latter half of the 2000s and the early 2010s. Much of what follows was culled not only from my own memory, but old virtual DJ crates that I came across after opening my Serato DJ software for the first time in many, many years.

It may be uncool to admit this now, but if there’s one person who was responsible for tropical/global bass catching on with aspiring hipsters and blog-reading music obsessives in Europe and North America, it was Diplo. In 2004, the Mad Decent founder released Favela on Blast, a mixtape of baile funk tracks he’d picked up on bootleg CDs while visiting Rio de Janeiro. A sequel, Favela Strikes Back, followed in 2005, and Diplo also employed some funk rhythms on M.I.A.’s Piracy Funds Terrorism Volume 1 mixtape and her early single “Bucky Done Gun.” Around the same time, a German artist and music journalist, Daniel Haaksman, who’d also gone to Brazil on a funk-digging mission, curated a compilation called Rio Baile Funk: Favela Booty Beats, which, unlike Diplo’s mixtapes, actually provided a proper tracklist. He also launched a label, Man Recordings, which would go on to release music from funkeiros like Edu K, Deize Tigrona, DJ Sandrinho, Sany Pitbull, and many others.

Baile funk wasn’t new to Brazilians, who simply called it “funk” and had been hearing the rowdy, electro-adjacent genre since the 1980s. Yet the music was viewed by much of Brazilian society as cheap, unsophisticated, and inexorably tied to the crime and poverty of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas (shanty towns), which prompted dominant local tastemakers to essentially dismiss it. That didn’t stop Diplo, Haaksman, and other gringo evangelists from spreading the word about baile funk in North America and Europe, and the hipster crowd in those regions immediately gobbled up not just the music, but the narrative around it. Few of them had anything resembling a substantive understanding of Brazilian culture and society, let alone the Portuguese language, but the idea of a fun and highly danceable genre coming from the supposedly lawless slums of Brazil proved irresistible. In practice, this fandom wasn’t that different from the same way that other very online, mostly white, mostly middle- and upper-class music fans glommed on to hip-hop, ghetto house, juke, Baltimore club, dancehall and any number of other sounds coming out of marginalized (and, more often than not, predominantly Black) communities around the globe.

The internet played a major role in stoking these passions, most prominently via music blogs, which in the mid 2000s were just beginning to assume a powerful role in the culture. The Mad Decent blog was one of the first major outposts, and often presented sounds with relatively little context and an irreverent tone. Other sites, such as Wayne Marshall’s Wayne & Wax and DJ /rupture’s mudd up!, brought a more thoughtful, academic perspective, and blogs like Ghetto Bassquake and Dave Quam’s It’s After the End of the World became important hubs, but on the whole, the online discourse was a free-for-all. Details were limited, fact-checking was rare, and research was usually limited to whatever could be figured out via a handful of Google searches. That should have inspired caution, but in an environment where it was exceedingly easy for music to be shared by people who often not only knew very little about it, but also had very few places to consult for quality information, the prevailing attitude tended to be rather cavalier.

It Started with a Little Party in Buenos Aires

The frenzy around baile funk was just one piece of that phenomenon, but it laid the groundwork for an entire procession of genres from Latin America, The Caribbean, and Africa to be similarly “discovered” by European and North American audiences. The loping rhythms of Cumbia was the first in that procession, and though the genre itself was Colombian in origin, and had peaked there back in the 1960s, eager gringos wound up zeroing in on the latest sounds coming out of Argentina. Favorable exchange rates had made cosmopolitan Buenos Aires into a burgeoning expat hub during the mid 2000s; once fashionable Europeans and Americans arrived in the city, some of them came upon a party/collective called Zizek Urban Beats Club. Taking its name from famed philosopher Slavoj Žižek—who was married to an Argentinian at the time—the crew was into dancehall, grime, mash-ups, hip-hop, and a variety of other bass-centric sounds, but cumbia quickly became its calling card. More specifically, it was a hybrid strain of cumbia—terms like “electro-cumbia” and “cumbia digital” pretty quickly started to be thrown around—in which Argentinian artists, newly empowered by the spread of cheap digital production software, combined the genre’s traditional rhythms with a myriad of electronic sounds.

Zizek, which would eventually rebrand as ZZK, had been started in 2006 by the trio of Texas native Grant Dull (a.k.a. El G) and Argentinians Villa Diamante and DJ Nim, and within a few months, the crew was given a weekly spot at Buenos Aires’ famed Niceto Club. Those parties represented only a small fraction of Argentina’s expansive cumbia landscape, which included everything from polished commercial pop artists to the more lurid cumbia villera that had started coming out of the country’s shantytowns and working-class neighborhoods in the 1990s. But when European and American music heads started telling their friends back home about the genre, it was usually cumbia digital that they talked about. Before long, Zizek and its orbit of artists, which included Chancha Vía Circuito, Fauna, Friktailers, Daleduro, Tremor, and El Remolón, among others, had been propelled into the blogosphere and onto the radar of folks who read magazines like Vice, FADER and XLR8R.

As it happens, I was one of the Americans spreading that gospel. I’d moved to Buenos Aires in late 2006, and shortly after arriving, linked up with another Bay Area expat, Oro11, who had been living in the Argentinian capital for several years and was tight with the local DJ and digger crowd. Together, we quickly realized that although the cumbia hybrids we were hearing at parties every week were being freely swapped among local artists, they weren’t being properly released anywhere. Confident that people outside of the country would be into these sounds, we decided to start a label, Bersa Discos, which got off the ground in late 2007. We also started a monthly party in San Francisco, Tormenta Tropical, which almost immediately drew a refreshingly mixed crowd of blog-reading hipsters, Latin immigrants (mostly from Mexico and Central America), and total randoms who figured any party playing Latin music would be a good time. (Side note: This era is also when I got hired at XLR8R magazine, where I immediately began pushing for the incorporation of cumbia and other emerging global bass sounds into the publication’s editorial content.)

The initial Bersa releases were focused on music from Argentinian artists we’d connected with in Buenos Aires: Daleduro, El Hijo de la Cumbia, and DJ Negro. But before long, our curatorial scope expanded to include producers like DJ Panik, a Texan-raised Mexican who combined cumbia with crunk beats; Uproot Andy, a Brooklyn-based Canadian with a passion for Afro-Latin rhythms; Toy Selectah, a cumbia-loving veteran from Monterrey who’d previously been part of a massive Mexican hip-hop group Control Machete; and Sabo, an East Coast-raised skater and DJ who’d started messing around with Latin rhythms after logging several years in NYC’s deep house and tribal house circuit.

The Cumbia Explosion

Cumbia—or, more accurately, this particular hybrid strain of cumbia—rapidly gained momentum. ZZK launched its own label in 2008, and almost instantly began embarking on tours of North America and Europe. In 2009, they were invited to play at Coachella for the first time. Tormenta Tropical became one of San Francisco’s most popular parties. (Other events in the city, such as Surya Dub and Dub Mission, were also swimming in bass-oriented waters.) After Oro11 relocated to Los Angeles, we started doing Tormenta Tropical events down there as well. It was in LA that we crossed paths with boundary-pushing, riddim-twisting artists like Nguzunguzu and Total Freedom, who together with director/performance artist Wu Tsang ran a party called Wildness at historic queer venue The Silver Platter. Mad Decent had also set up shop in Southern California, and although Diplo was already well on his way to stardom, people like Paul Devro—a Canadian transplant who basically ran the label’s still-influential blog—were in our extended orbit. So were Latin artists like Chico Sonido, DJ Lengua, Ganas and the wider Más Exitos crew, who’d all been into cumbia well before it became trendy, and who often approached the genre with more of a digger mentality. For those with a taste for live cumbia and vallenato music, there was also LA band Very Be Careful, whose riotous concerts provided a change of pace in what was otherwise a very DJ-centric scene.

California, with its large Mexican population, made for a natural cumbia hotspot—the genre has had a huge following in the country for several decades—and so did Texas, where the Austin-based Peligrosa collective launched a party of their own. The sizable crew, which included Orión Garcia, King Louie, Manolo Black, Pagame, Mannydojo, Hobo D, and DJ Dus (a.k.a. El Dusty), helped bring Tormenta Tropical to SXSW for the first time in 2010, and in the process established themselves as a key node on what was then a rapidly growing, albeit still rudimentary, network of like-minded events across the US. As time went on, parties like Bombón and Picó Picante established additional outposts in Houston and Boston, respectively; back in the Bay Area, even San Jose was a hub of activity, spurned on by the cumbia experiments of artists like Turbo Sonidero and Mex Tape.

A network was taking shape. Although it was strongest west of the Mississippi, the music shaping this scene—which was expanding beyond cumbia, prompting aficionados to instead use terms like “tropical bass” and “global bass”—also took root in New York City, and didn’t stop there. Its continued evolution will be addressed in part two of this column, which will also lay out why the trend eventually fell out of fashion among European and North American tastemakers, and what happened once they stopped paying attention.